OK, when I say old, about 2 years old, but it was showing its age. It was taking nearly 5 minutes to reboot, and closing Eclipse could take a minute or two.

I decided to invest in a SSD . Not a state-of-the-art SSD, one that’s a little older, but only cost $118 for 480GB. My old drive was 1TB but I had only used about 300GB, so I figured 480GB would keep me for a long, long time. I ended up purchasing a SanDisk SSD PLUS 480GB Solid State Drive (SDSSDA-480G-G26) because of the brand name, and the reviews were good.… Read the rest

I have had a lot of problems with ecs-agent always connecting to the “default” cluster rather than the one I want it to connect to. All the other instructions missed one vital step – removing ecs-agent from docker and reinstalling – that way it re-reads the ECS config file – without this step I could not get ecs-agent to connect to anything other than “default” cluster.

Storing information in transients is a great way to speed up WordPress, especially if you’re using a memory cache instead of the options table. However, storing false in transients is difficult, because false means there is no transient in the cache. So how do you store false in WordPress transients?

Why would you want to store false? Generally you would want to store false when it is a legitimate value – for example, when looking for the permalink for a slug, if the slug doesn’t exist then false is a valid return, and you wouldn’t want to query the database every time you looked up the missing slug.… Read the rest

I’ve been having plenty of problems with Chrome being really slow to start or slow to open new tabs on Windows 8. After finding the solution once, the problem then reoccurred a few months later and, of course, I couldn’t find the solution again!

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The problem came to light looking at the query plan – the table wp_postmeta was using key meta_key and returning 292058 rows with information:
Using index condition; Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort

Removing that cast changed the query to use the same table, key, and query plan, but to only return 257 rows.… Read the rest

The internet has opened the possibility of involving outside agents, such as consumers, to provide ideas for products for a company. Prior to the internet, consumers did not have a direct link to the decision makers in an organization. With the opening of the internet channel, consumers not only can, but want to, interact with a brand.

That interaction can take the form of:

Feedback â€“ both positive and negative. Such as too much tomato sauce on a pizza, a picture of which is posted to Dominoâ€™s Facebook. Dominoâ€™s replied and apologized and gave a free pizza in return.

Requesting Features and Improvements â€“ people using your product know exactly what it can and canâ€™t do in a real life situation and what real-life issues they encounter, such as twisting cords on hairdryers (why donâ€™t they fix that one?)

New Product Ideas â€“ while using your products consumers might have product ideas, such as brand extensions with flavoring in cough medicine, or even totally new products.

Part (all) of a search marketers job is to increase sales. To that end implementing an abandoned cart system allows you to double back to someone who almost bought and try once again to convert them. Once an abandoned cart system is in place you should work on optimizing for conversions, after all higher conversion rates mean more sales which makes everyone happy.

To this end I found this blog post 37 Examples of Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails which has the text of 37 different abandoned cart emails sent out by various companies on the web. Not only did I find the text interesting but the fact that Zappos has two text messages shows they are split testing their abandoned cart emails.… Read the rest